It was sunny on Sunday and I opened up the windows and got out of bed late and finally figured out how to listen to Tim Buckley’s first, self-titled album, which I’ve had for ages ’cause it’s on the same CD as the more mature, more experimental and thus supposedly ‘better’ Goodbye and Hello, but had accepted for once the received muso wisdom that it was a curio, a debut that’s really only interesting in the light of what Buckley did next and had decided that my addiction to the piano part in ‘Song for Janie’ was more of a Van Dyke Parks problem than a Buckley problem, and that actually, you know what, I don’t even have much a Buckley problem in the first place, I’m not altogether convinced by the guy, I’m sorry.

So anyway it was sunny and I was on my own, which are the ideal conditions for listening to Tim Buckley by Tim Buckley, and I flitted around the upstairs of the house catching bits of each song, and it was then I figured out that the only way to listen to it was to forget it was by Tim Buckley, Tragic Songwriter, and just tease out bits of the music surrounding him and marvel in them for a few moments. Forget who the boy is who yodels the unintentionally hilarious lyric “Just for you, with your open hands/Waiting for the touch of man…” The dude’s just another instrument, in this instance he sounds like a clarinet; right now he’s going all strident at you but in a minute everything will break down and he’ll just breathe some soft notes out of it while an electric piano burbles around him. He’s the soloist only in that he’s higher in the mix than anything else. This album’s all about fragments and hints. It’s all about the edges and corners of the songs and the beauty that can lurk in such places.

Which is really just a fancy way of saying it’s all about the arrangements, which are beautiful and unsettling. They’re unsettling because just as you squirm at the banality and obviousness of a vocal line, a stealth attack of strings swoops in from one side and knocks you for six, flutters around your ribcage for a very tiny moment, and suddenly the song is magic and it is saved.

Of course, fans of girl group music are familiar with the juxtaposition of the simplistic, teenage lyric or the nursery-rhyme-simple melody with the heavenly string section. I mean, duh. But on Tim Buckley it’s somehow weirder and more poignant. Maybe because he wasn’t a girl group; he was a troubadour type who probably wanted to keep it real and ended up with Jack Nitzsche’s hyperreal violins instead.

Maybe, also, because Nitzsche’s strings are not the of the schmaltzy variety that were often drafted in to sweeten Sixties pop music. Instead, they’re sparingly used, delicately so; they don’t merely follow the song and bolster it with lovely chintzy violin pillows, instead they have a diaolgue with it. But this isn’t to say they’re over-complex, or at odds with the fairytale naivety of this album. On ‘Wings’ he takes a chance with a really basic, folksy, descending string line dropped between Buckley’s vocals about flying free as seabirds or something, and it completely works, recasting the song as a candy-coloured pop-drenched lullaby instead of the wholesomely twee jangler it coulda been.

With lesser songs like ‘It happens every time’, it’s like Nitzsche knows there’s not much he can do with the song itself, because it is pretty bad, so he opts for using the strings as a sort of dreamy dynamic device: they follow the bass line, kind of, in melody, but their main function is to place this slightly uninspired song in a world of soft, shifting texture so that it’s no longer a simplistic expression of disappointment but something much more epic, much more cyclical. It sounds simulatneously like your first romantic let-down and all the romantic let-downs you’ll ever have: Buckley’s lyrics are dumb innocence; Nitzsche’s strings, bitter experience.

But really, I get the feeling Nitzsche would have done strings like this for anyone that paid him to, and so what this album’s about for me is Van Dyke Parks. Specifically, Parks’ piano on ‘Song For Janie’, which is also one of the album’s strongest songs as far as Buckley’s songwriting and performance goes (he actually sounds as if he’s enjoying the recording session, and that he might go for a beer afterwards).

Apparently Parks overdubbed most of the piano parts after the main body of the album had been recorded, and there is a weirdly lonesome quality to a lot of them, like they’ve been doodled on a page that’s already written and printed. But they’re the most awesome doodles, the scribbles of a stupidly talented compulsive musician who can’t resist turning a folk-rock song into a sort of vaudevillian baroque tapestry. And on this track, they’re both ornate and full of feeling and laid-back breezy sunny rightness, depending on the part of the song. Contrary to what you’d expect, the verse takes the big, fun-sounding chords in the left hand, and the chorus forefronts the high-up fiddly-diddly Fender Rhodes line, so that the chorus isn’t a payoff of any kind, it’s more of a little patch of musical uncertainty (”Janie, don’t you know?” asks Buckley) before resolving, taking a breath, and back to the verse again.

I remember the first time I heard it listening to it a good few times in a row, willing the verse to come back again one more time so I could enjoy falling into it again. It’s never quite long enough.

Posted on Monday, April 3rd, 2006by Frances May Morgan